Little is known about general anesthetics, the drugs that put patients in a coma-like state, feeling no pain or discomfort while being operated on. A new study shows that these classes of drugs change the activity of a specific region of the brain and make it more difficult for the parts to communicate.

A new study published in the journal Nature Methods, shows that a novel local anesthetic developed by a group of researchers at UC Berkeley, University of Münich, and the Université de Boardeaux, can be switched on and off using different wavelengths of light, allowing a much finer control of which nerves are blocked.